“Although Pierrot Fischer’s father didn’t die in the Great War, his mother Émilie always maintained it was the war that killed him.”

Upcoming Readings

In 2015, I set up the John Boyne Scholarship for Irish students undertaking the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. I was a student on the MA in 1994/95 – when I could barely afford to

The Irish Book Awards Are Tonight Heading out to the Irish Book Awards tonight in the Doubletree Hotel, Dublin. It’s the 10th Anniversary of the book awards. I’ve won 3 times in the past, for Children’s Book of the Year

Top Ten Young Narrators Here’s a piece I wrote for The Guardian a while back. The appeal of writing through the voice of a young narrator is one that attracts most writers from time to time even if, for the

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Guardian recently on top 10 friendships in Young Adult fiction. Rudyard Kipling – The Jungle Book (1894) Unlikely friendships between humans and animals are staples of both children’s literature and cinema. Kipling’s

Here’s a piece I wrote for the Waterstone’s site about war fiction. In some recent publicity material for my new young adult novel THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN, my UK publishers described me as ‘the voice